American Political Satire Sucks Because It Force Feeds You Answers Instead of Asking You Questions
"The Boys" Season 4 is just the latest satire to miss the point of the medium.
In Season 4 of The Boys — the hit Amazon show that satirizes superheroes by portraying most of them as cynical, murderous celebrities with little concern for truth or justice while working for a shadowy conglomerate — we’re greeted with a slew of plots and subplots that carry a political message.
See if you can pluck it out based on some of the plot points (it’s very subtle):
An antagonist superhero justifies murdering someone who threw litter at his son by claiming the man was a pedophile.
An antagonist superhero/radio host sympathetic to the aforementioned antagonist superhero describes the murdered man as “antifa.”
The protagonists happen upon a conspiratorial political convention and fandom that whose beliefs include: we are ruled by lizard people, climate change is a hoax, white power, and innocent children are being secretly trafficked.
The antagonists really like Jesus-themed musicals.
The shadowy conglomerate is pumping out superhero films that include a plotline where a black superhero is mentored by a condescending white coach.
An armed man allied with the protagonists shows up at a youth center hoping to rescue enslaved children in an almost word-for-word reenactment of Pizzagate.
One antagonist superhero wants a prohibition on “critical supe theory.”
An antagonist superhero complains about a politician who “refuses to alone with any woman who isn’t his wife” mansplaining abortion to her (I wonder who that is?)
OK, obviously I was kidding about it being subtle. I could keep listing the many political plot points and references scattered throughout this season’s episodes, but then I think I’d be beating you over the head as much as the show’s writers did.
It’s obvious that showrunner Eric Kripke has a bone to pick with American conservatives. This was cause for celebration for many of the show’s liberal fans, who enjoy the mockery and often take part in it themselves.
One of the most common defenses of the Season 4 was for these liberals to pose some variation of the question: “Wait, are you just now realizing this show is making fun of you?”
But as I progressed through all eight episodes this season, I found myself wondering whether Kripke and his writing team were making fun of the entire audience for having to pretend there was any wit here at all.
Instead of building out complex allegories that posed moral dilemmas that might cause us to pause and reflect on real life, they instead chose to simply copy and paste political references in a sort of high-budget game of Mad Libs.
It’s as if Orwell decided to sprinkle Animal Farm with verbatim quotes from Lenin and Stalin, removing any subtext and making the book into an episode of Saturday Night Live — more parody than satire.
Awash in weak satire
But the lazy, ripped-from-the-headlines writing in the latest season of The Boys isn’t the biggest problem in American satire.
Strong satire works well when it poses questions and makes us reconsider the beliefs we hold dear.
Weak satire, on the other hand, falls flat on its face when it’s trying to force-feed us the answers.
We Americans are awash in weak satire.
Take 2021’s Don’t Look Up, which earned four Oscar nominations.
The Adam McKay-helmed climate change satire was a really fun watch. Unlike Kripke, McKay didn’t rip all his political dialogue directly from years-old headlines.
He created his own world and his own metaphor for the issue he was trying to highlight: climate change, which was represented in the form of a comet headed for the earth.
It’s entertaining to watch leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play a pair of scientists who are trying to convince the U.S. government and news media to care about our impending doom.
When they first appear on a Morning Joe-style program to explain what’s happening, the hosts barely seem interested. They find it difficult to persuade anybody in the news media to take the issue seriously, despite the imminent demise of everybody on the planet.
But the movie’s allegory ultimately fails to reflect reality because it’s just hard to believe that the news media would ignore an impending catastrophe.
If a comet was heading towards earth, CNN would have Harry Enten explaining the situation with a holographic comet, MSNBC would be putting up a comet countdown ticker, and Fox News would probably have on someone every hour to propose a different kind of explosive solution to this existential dilemma.
The news media loves negative stories and it loves sensationalism.
And the comet denial movement that springs up in the movement just isn’t coherent.
Some of them deny the comet exists altogether, while others tell each other that it’s good — we should be mining it for minerals. At one point in the movie, these people are rallying side by side at the same events holding signs telling people the comet is fake and that the comet is a valuable resource for us.
I get what McKay is trying to do: tell us that people who deny global warming and people who want to profit off of it are on the same side.
But it just doesn’t come across as a fair critique of climate skeptics. The movie is dripping in condescension towards anyone who might find themselves on the conservative side of climate debates.
Like The Boys, Don’t Look Up stacks the deck way too much to be persuasive. It acts as if it has all the answers — there’s no reason why anyone would be on the other side of these issues, and if they are, they’re simply stupid.
That’s how you end up not only with Don’t Look Up telling us that mainstream media isn’t sensationalist enough but also with The Boys featuring an Amazon-meets-Pfizer level behemoth like the Vought Corporation that has the politics of MAGA rather than the cosmopolitan attitudes adopted by the Fortune 500.
What good satire looks like
OK, it’s easy to say everything’s terrible. But what does good satire look like?
My favorite satirical film takes place about 5,000 miles away, in Germany.
Look Who’s Back, the film inspired by the book with the same title, features none other than Adolf Hitler, who has been magically transported from his bunker in World War II Germany to the modern day.
But despite looking, dressing, and acting like the real Adolf Hitler, nobody believes that he’s the genuine article.
That doesn’t stop Hitler, though. He goes about devouring every bit of knowledge he can about modern day Germany so he can rebuild his movement. He discovers the Internet, using it to inform himself about everyday politics, technology, and society.
And then the Internet discovers him. He becomes a popular television host and social media sensation.
How he does this is what makes the film effective — and, at times, chilling — satire.
Hitler is portrayed not as bumbling idiot or knuckle dragging racist, but as a sophisticated, well-spoken, and at times even quite funny showman and statesman. We see him cleverly dismantle the existing talk show hosts in Germany and defenestrate establishment politicians.
Before long, his following includes not just the far-right hardliners in Germany’s existing modern day far-right parties — who he dresses down as a bunch of losers who can’t accomplish anything — but the mainstream of the German masses.
While he still harbors resentments against Jews, he keeps those feelings private. Instead, he quickly figures out that modern day Germany’s debates are all about North African migrants. He shifts his rhetoric accordingly, and before long he has millions of adoring fans, young and old alike.
Without spoiling anything, eventually the movie forces the audience to ask themselves an unfortunate question: are the kind of people who end up lining up to support a dictator like Hitler not just weirdos and extremists, but instead people like you and me? Could anyone be taken in by an authoritarian leader who is clever and charismatic enough?
Those are the kind of questions good satire forces you to ask.
Rules for good satire
So what sort of rules might we follow if we want to see good satire on American airwaves again?
Here are a few I would recommend:
Treat your audience like adults: There’s nothing wrong with The Boys making fun of American conservatives. There’s plenty to make fun of. But don’t treat them your audience like they’re children: ripping plotlines from headlines and dialogue from real-life political discussion is lazy and low-brow — that’s the kind of behavior you expect from kids during recess who are repeating insults they heard on TV or among their parents’ discussions.
Nuance isn’t a four-letter word (it’s six letters!): Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite won Oscars and for good reason: it’s a nuanced story about the role social and economic class plays in South Korea. The plot, which revolves around a working-class South Korean family taking advantage of a richer one, is less a morality play about the rich vs. the poor and more of an analysis of the pressures society brings to bear on both groups. “All the characters in Parasite are in the gray zone,” the director said to one interviewer. “They’re all nice to some degree and bad to some degree. And I think that’s closer to reality.”
It’s OK to pick on more than one side: Leading from the last rule, sometimes what makes satire ring most true is when you’re able to take shots at both sides. The Boys and Don’t Look Up feature a few throwaway shots at liberals, but for the most part you know the writers have their Jacobin subscriptions fully up to date. There’s a different way to approach political and social comedy where it is able to. That’s what made Norman Lear’s shows so good. The late comedy writer was a died in the wool liberal, but his shows like All In The Family and Good Times featured plotlines and jokes that catered to left and right alike.
There’s plenty of disfunction in our politics and society.
Satire can help us both make sense of it and laugh at it at the same time.
But we have to take it up a notch. What do you think satirists could be doing better?
Season 4 of the Boys was just painful, and not because it doesn’t take shots at “both sides” (they seem to be trying to parody #metoo at times but don’t really know how) but because not a single joke lands. They’re also pushing a twinfold narrative that MAGA voters are simultaneously 1. paranoid conspiracy theorist losers who think progressives are coming for their children and 2. Going to put half the country in prison camps and come for your children. The irony is so deep that the season 4 finale could almost be interpreted as a metafictional satire of how storytellers project their own persecution fantasies onto rival political factions, if only the writers and showrunners were remotely intelligent or witty enough for such a device to be plausible.
While I have no answer to your parting questions, I do want to thank you for:
(1) highlighting the beauty and importance of asking over telling--not that I'm any kind of practical expert!--and
(2) inspiring me to use the time I would have spent watching season 4 to read Look Who's Back, instead. :)